1/09/2009 @ 12:48PM

Beijing's Own 'Yellow Peril' Is Online

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown on June 4, 1989, a sensitive time for Beijing, which has put the cyberworld on alert. While in keeping with the rise-and-ebb cycle typical of the government’s censorship campaigns, Beijing’s current clampdown on Internet pornography seems to be a test run of popular Web sites’ readiness to ferret and sweep out undesirable content. With politically charged commemorations looming ahead as the real test of compliance, Internet companies, foreign and domestic alike, are doing their best to remain in the authorities’ good graces.

The central government reviewed the progress of major search engines and Web portals, including those run by
Baidu
,
Google
and
Microsoft
, in rooting out vulgar content that “violated society’s morals and harmed the health of young people,” based on an online notice posted Thursday by the China Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center. Earlier in the week, the official body listed more than a dozen sites that displayed vulgar content and has since issued evaluations of the sites’ responsiveness to Beijing’s warnings. Few companies’ efforts passed muster: many sites did not act “quickly” enough, and others did not take “effective action” at all. Google needed to go further with its cleanup, while Baidu’s actions were deemed “ineffective.”

Baidu stated Wednesday that “we feel deeply guilty.”
Sina
said it was “deeply sad.” Another flagged portal, Tom Online, which has a tie-up with Skype, said it was “deeply regretful.” Google China promised in a blog post to “work hard” to clean up content “that could have adverse effects on Internet users.”

The blacklisting is part of the government’s monthlong campaign to sweep the country’s Internet of “yellow,” or vulgar, content. Internet companies must censor their sites to eliminate pornographic and politically sensitive content or risk having their licenses taken away by the bureaucracy. That means deploying censorship teams and filtering technologies that sift through text, photo and video. Users may be blocked from posting certain content or may find their posts taken down. Through routers and servers that make up a system that has been coined “the Great Firewall,” the government also blocks Web sites or pages. All this manpower and technology will be similarly deployed in a cat-and-mouse game to chase out the massive amounts of “dissident” content and material commemorating the government’s bloody repression of the Tiananmen protests sure to hit the Web as the country nears June 4.

The targets of China’s censorship regime have expanded over the years to span the social, political and economic spheres, but they have been moving targets depending on the country’s climate. When China’s stock market plummeted in 2008, Beijing cracked down on unfavorable financial reporting, according to a Sept. 10 story in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. The Communist Party’s propaganda bureau urged top financial Web sites to refrain from publishing negative commentary and headlines about the market, said the news article, citing three online editors.

Still, a lot of cybercontent undesirable to Beijing will be out there, accessible to Chinese Internet users who know how to get around the roadblocks. Steven M. Dickinson, a Qingdao-based partner with Harris & Moure, argues that the Web is simply too big to manage. “It’s a legal fiction,” he said. Beijing “can’t really control it the way they pretend they can.” Further, each site is “supposed to police it[self], but the site can’t,” given the sheer volume of content trafficked virtually.